Feeling the Love: Building Community through #DartmouthLoveStory - Higher Ed Experts Marketing Memo

I was so excited to be asked to write a Marketing Memo for Higher Ed Experts, a great professional group that offers lots of different types of online courses, conferences, and articles for higher education professionals.

My marketing memo is a case study of one of our most successful social media campaigns, #DartmouthLoveStory. One of my favorite pieces to put together each year, the Love Story interviews dozens of Dartmouth alumni couples. In my marketing memo, I cover how the story and adjacent social media campaign meet my department's mission, and discuss the history and future of the story. I hope you'll give it a read!

New Copywriting Piece: Rachel Dratch Article

Tonight, Dartmouth will be hosting Dartmouth Idol, a musical competition that brings together some of our incredible students. This year is it's 10th anniversary, and because of this, a very special guest, Rachel Dratch '88 of Saturday Night Live fame, will be hosting. I was lucky enough to have the chance to interview her ahead of the show!

You can read the complete article here, and if you're in the mood for a musical treat, you can watch Dartmouth Idol online tonight at 8pm.

New Copywriting Piece: Dartmouth Love Stories

More than almost anything else, I love a good love story. So, you can imagine how excited I was to work on "And the Rest Is History: Dartmouth Love Stories" for the Dartmouth Alumni News website. In the story, I've interviewed more than 20 couples who are both Dartmouth alumni.

Most met at college and got married soon after, but quite a few met after college, too. It was so fun getting to know these incredible couples and having a small peek into their lives (not to mention into some of their wonderful old photos)!

I've had a really great time at this job over the last four months, but this is by far my favorite project I've worked on. I hope you'll hop over and have a read. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

Event Recap - Entry Level: Hiring and Getting Hired

It was so much fun to sit on a panel about entry level jobs for Sarah Lawrence grads last month. SLC is an amazing place that prepares its students to think analytically, problem solve, and write lucidly, no matter what you study there. And, when their creativity and passion come through, I think SLC grads are just about the best hires you can find.

In the panel, we covered basics like, "Dress as much like a conservative adult as you can muster, at least at the interview" and "Yeah, get a LinkedIn, it will help in the long run" and then answered questions both specific and general. I think my favorite moment was when one senior asked, "Should we be scared? Is the real world really as bad as it seems?" and every panelist said in unison, "Absolutely!"

It was also great to meet my fellow panelists, Mike Goodman and Alanna Duncan, who were both fantastic. Mike said something that has really stuck with me since the panel: "There's a moment where you realize that your work can be creative and exciting and challenging, and when you find that, you'll be more fulfilled by it than you ever thought you could be." I'm so thrilled to have found that fulfilling, creative work myself, and I hope that all the seniors and recent grads in the audience find theirs soon!

Interview: SLC Internview & Impact

A few months ago, my alma mater, Sarah Lawrence, contacted me and my colleagues Emily Krupin and Niel Rosenthalis (also SLC grads) for an interview about our jobs.  They misspelled my name and misquoted us a few times, but I do think they captured the spirit of what makes SLC students such good hires, so I thought I'd share the story (in its different forms) here.

If you're interested to read more about SLC internships, you can read Internview here: http://issuu.com/slcocc/docs/internview.  We're featured on page 24 and my classmate Hannah Kinney is on page 23.

SLC Impact

SLC Internview (click to read)

New York University Graduation - May 20, 2013

A few days after the reading, on May 20th, 2013, I walked across the stage at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences graduation ceremony.  It was a lovely event, and a nice way to cap off an incredible two years of study.  It's possible that this is the last graduation I'll ever have, so I wanted to really savor it, and I did.  Here are a few images from the day:

Me!

The ceremony.

Me with Deborah Landau, our program director.

 

The whole family came along!

With a few friends before the ceremony.

NYU MFA Week

The end of this past semester was so hectic that I'm only now coming out from under everything.  Now that I'm not living on a diet of take-out and stress, I'm looking forward to writing, submitting, and reading a lot more than I have in ages.  Before I leap onto new things, though, I think its worth looking back at the end of school, so I'll be doing that this week.  Stay tuned for posts on my fellowship, thesis reading, graduation, and work as a reading coordinator.  And today, a very brief love letter to my MFA.

Before I decided to apply for MFAs, I was pretty lost.  I was working in a dead-end customer service job.  I was rejected from a few teaching programs and had no idea what I was going to do next.  I'd always been comforted by poetry, so I started reading it again, and memorized a little Robert Frost.  It was a turning point for me, and the next fall, I took an excellent workshop at the New School with Miranda Field, a completely brilliant poet who encouraged me to apply to NYU.  I worried that it was the only program I was applying to that wasn't fully funded, but knew immediately after looking at the faculty list that it was the one for me.  One acceptance, a whole lot of funding, amazing friends and poems, and one graduation later, I can say with certainty that it really was the right program for me.

The opportunity to focus on writing, to make the craft of poetry my biggest priority for two years was incredible.  But to do it with the support of some of the very finest living poets, in New York City, surrounded by the most generous friends possible, was an absolute dream come true.  I can't imagine another program so full of warmth, and I feel blessed to have been a part of it.  From my very first workshop, where Sharon Olds made me feel like my poem had an innate light, to the moment Yusef Komunyakaa signed off on my thesis and said, "Well, it's done now," there wasn't a minute of the program that didn't feel like pure magic.  I'm so grateful to have been a part of the amazing NYU community for the past two years, and I can't wait to take all I've learned and continue to use it and grow in poetry.


Other Posts on NYU MFA Week:

• Goldwater Hospital Reading
• NYU Thesis Reading
• Graduation Day!
• The Emerging Writers Reading Series